She married the actor Maxwell Coker, who had been in the first London production of Oklahoma!, in 1950 (they divorced in 1953) and then Richard Adler, the lyricist of the Broadway hits The Pajama Game and Damn Yankees, in 1958.Īdler wrote Kwamina (1961) for her, a Broadway musical set in a village in west Africa which, despite choreography by Agnes de Mille, proved a misfire in a heated time of civil rights protest. She later said how unhappy she was with some of these films and she eventually managed to break a seven-year contract with Rank so that she could move on to the stage. Her prodigious juvenile output in the subsequent decade included Dead of Night (1945), an anthology horror film with Michael Redgrave, Googie Withers and Frederick Valk, the first sound screen adaptation of Nicholas Nickleby (1947 she was Kate), Anna Karenina (1948) with Vivien Leigh, The History of Mr Polly (1949), with John Mills, and Honeymoon Deferred (1951) with Kieron Moore and Griffith Jones. Her first film was the title role in Thursday’s Child (1942), written by Rodney Ackland, co-starring Wilfrid Lawson and Stewart Granger. Sally Ann Howes in the 1947 film The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby. Born in St John’s Wood, she grew up in London and Hertfordshire surrounded by her parents’ show-business friends (Cicely Courtneidge and Jack Hulbert were neighbours), and was educated at Queenswood school in Hatfield. Her older brother, Peter, became a musician. Howes was the second child of Bobby and his wife, the actor and singer Patricia Malone. In playing opposite her father, the musical comedy star Bobby Howes (the original Mr Cinders), she was at least, and at last, fulfilling her destiny. In 1953 she established herself fully in the West End when she played Jennifer Rumson in Paint Your Wagon (featuring the songs Wand’rin’ Star, and I Talk to the Trees) for 18 months at Her Majesty’s theatre.
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Howes did, however, get there later in 1951, in a revue, Fancy Free (not the Jerome Robbins ballet) at the Prince of Wales theatre in London. Unfortunately, on her very first number on any stage, the conductor fumbled the score to the floor and Howes had to sing unaccompanied while the music sheets were noisily gathered, the instruments picked up their places one by one and, following them tentatively, she modulated gradually back into the correct key. Three years before Andrews made her name in New York in Sandy Wilson’s The Boy Friend (1954), Howes made her stage debut in a show for which Wilson had written the lyrics, Caprice (1951), a musical comedy of domestic confusion in the south of France, at the Alhambra theatre in Glasgow. The upside of this nearly star status was that Howes could make surprising and adventurous choices in her work, such as appearing in a West End thriller, Lover (also 1973) by Brian Clemens, with Max Wall, or a musical version of James Joyce’s The Dead (2000), with Blair Brown and Christopher Walken, off-Broadway and, briefly, on.Īlthough she was six years older than Andrews, the parallel career landmarks of both were uncanny. In 1973 the hills were alive again, not with the sound of Julie, but of Sally, as she led a US tour of The Sound of Music.
Sally Ann Howes and Dick Van Dyke perform the famous music-box scene in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.
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